graverobber
by blossom in ribcage
Summary: Aang chooses forgiveness; even when it's hard, even when it's wasted. That's how he keeps his people alive.


Not compliant with the comics or LOK.

* * *

 _Monk Gyatso isn't innocent_ , he thinks, watching the first red tendrils of Sozin's Comet streak across the sky. _He was surrounded by skeletons when you found him. Neither is Yangchen— even she said that you don't have the luxury of detachment._ Head in his hands, he wonders what it'll be like to kill somebody. Sokka and Katara say that he did it before, that he sent hundreds of sailors to an icy grave, but he wasn't himself, then, just a spirit's empty vessel and endless nightmares about drowning.

The Avatar must be judge, jury, and executioner. If Roku has taught him anything, it's that your scruples become your enemy's weapons. Fire Lord Ozai is a bad man— he wrecked his country, he's laughing while he burns a continent into cinders right now, he could kill everyone Aang loves if he doesn't get up and kill him first, he hurt Zuko in ways Aang can't really process yet. Maybe it would be far less moral to let him live.

(Balmy summer days, warm breeze on the back of my neck. Untangling spiderflies caught in their own webs. The sting of the tattooing: it is written on my skin, I am a master now, the weight of expectation immovable on my shoulders)

— But he's not a child, anymore. Wrong century, wrong advisors, wrong choice(s).

The seventh chakra remains stubbornly locked. Aang grinds his palms into his eyes to stave off tears.

* * *

Whenever he talks to Ozai, he makes sure to put a sprig of tulsi in his pocket. It's a silly superstition, almost a childish one, but rubbing his thumb and fingers over it helps him stay focused. Reminds him that there is a world outside this twisted, stunted man's microcosm, his heart that considers possession a synonym for love.

"Do you regret anything yet?" he asks— slumped against the bars of the cell, his back to the _phoenix king_. It's a swelteringly hot summer even by Fire Nation standards, within the prison's labyrinthine bowels, and he can just feel the sweat dripping off his forehead as he wastes his time here. "Anything at all?"

"In fact, I do," comes Ozai's purr, and Aang knows without turning around that he's smirking. Lion-tiger, defanged, but he'll cling to whatever weapons he has left. "Right after my so-called _son_ was born, I should have smashed his head against a rock. Without him teaching you firebending tricks, I could've squashed you like my grandfather squashed every last member of your people."

There is something brutally, violently intimate about energybending; this is the most repulsive man in the world; the two collide. Sometimes he can feel him crawling through his bloodstream, the sheer cruelty of his spirit taking up residence in his head. He wonders if this is what it's like to be Zuko.

Aang gets up and leaves, because there's nothing to say.

He thinks ( _hopes_ ) Ozai would cry if he saw the sunlight again.

* * *

They have to keep her chained all the time, in this perfectly white, sterile room, because she gouges her arms and beats her head against the wall and tries to rip her own hair out whenever the opium wears off. "Just give me a knife," she howls, more animal than human. "A knife a knife a knife. If you won't give me my fucking fire back at least give me a knife please please just give me a knife—"

The Ozai side of him, the bad side that he hates himself so much for, lets a hand crawl up his tunic to feel the ragged starburst there, and it looks upon this and says it is good. Sixteen years old, and her own mind punishes her better than anything he could've devised.

"I brought you a blanket," he says slowly (crouching, unafraid), as if words can penetrate this miasma of fear; she recoils from it like she would from a blow. It's an insipid thing taken out of her childhood bedroom, yellow and patterned with turtle ducks. In contrast to feral, bulging eyes, cracked lips, faint bruises on her wrists from where she's thrashed against her restraints, he has never felt more ridiculous in his life.

"But I killed you," she rasps; her voice sounds like a dagger raked across shamisen strings. "You're dead, Avatar. I killed you. I didn't fail. I _killed_ you."

"No." He's gentle. He chooses this, even when it's hard, even when he'd rather be anything else. "I'm still alive. And I'm going to help you get better."


End file.
